'Boston Marriage' explores the complexities of two middle-aged women in all their scathing, catty glory, writes Belinda McKeon.
The city is Boston, the year somewhere in the late 19th century. The two middle-aged women who share a home and are wealthy enough to afford the maid they love to insult are Anna, whose married lover has just given her an emerald necklace, and Claire, who is dizzy with the bliss and the terror of having fallen in love with a younger woman. Anna and Claire are themselves, it quickly becomes obvious, most probably lovers, and have been for a long time; this is why they resent one another's external dalliances, even as they insist, hungrily, upon hearing the details.
"Claire"; "Anna"; Boston; the age of Victoriana. In David Mamet's 1999 play Boston Marriage, these names, this place, this point in time are the official parameters of meaning, the bulwarks of agreed cultural identity. And tellingly, once Mamet's words are taken off the page and brought to the stage - as they will be next week, when the b*spoke theatre company production of the play comes to the Project Arts Centre - these are the marks of identity which disappear completely from view. As the women confront a day of dramatic discoveries from the safety of their drawingroom, as they face the possibility first of sensual pleasure, then of material riches, then of losing everything, including each other, forever, they do not call one another by name, do not mention their city. Of their era, of its larger anxieties and beliefs, they barely seem conscious.
But theirs is not the scatty detachment of housebound old dears. Tucked down a Dublin side street in their rehearsal studio (the impressively renovated Theatre Space) actors Jane Brennan and Ingrid Craigie positively crackle with energy as they bring alive these wicked women, so strategic of purpose, so scathing of wit, who have thrown off other people's trappings to lead their own lives, set their own rules, in a language that dips and swerves between cold formality and catty derision. Under the eye of English director Loveday Ingram, who has come to Dublin straight from directing When Harry Met Sally at London's Theatre Royal, they wrestle with the intricacies of receiving a fateful letter. Half in costume - full white skirts, and sheets draped like togas - and half in their rehearsal uniform of jeans and trainers - they look like sisters, and act like it too - mocking, snapping, snatching at each other - but with an undertone of sexual closeness that flashes in their eyes even as they argue about the Bible.
Mamet has given to his characters a speech of potent opposites. At one moment they speak as if reciting lines from Emily Dickinson: at others, as they hurl vitriolic bursts of modern slang across the stage, they seem like the dreadful offspring of Godot and Ab Fab. Stuck in the middle is the young maid (Laura Donnelly), who has to put up with everything from sarcastic remarks about the Famine ("I'm Scottish, Mum," she repeats wearily) to an offhand sexual proposition from Craigie's Anna.
The potential for a darkly hilarious play is clear, and that much will doubtless be the result, but in the studio, Ingram is clearly striving to coax something more than laughter from Mamet's words. The expression on Anna's face when the letter arrives must be funny, she explains, but deeply dignified, too, and shadowed by fear; and when Claire, realising the contents of the letter, explodes with fury, her anger must be complex, her disappointment as much for herself as for her companion. So they open the letter, over and over and over.
"We're at the difficult stage in rehearsal where it's two weeks since we really found the play funny ourselves," says Ingram when the actors take their lunchbreak. "And now we've done it so many times that it's not funny anymore. But with comedy like this, it has to come out of the reality of the situation, the truth of it. For me, what's so fascinating about this piece is how incredibly cruel the women are to each other, and how violent the language is."
Mamet's humour, for Ingram, comes from the tradition of clowning - the close interaction of frivolity and anguish. "We laugh when the clown is in agony," she says. "That line between pain and joy is very close in this play, and we realise that it's when the characters are really suffering, or deeply embarrassed, or suddenly experiencing a shock that we're laughing. At their pain."
Mamet, author of more than 20 plays, including Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo, and almost as many films, is a figure of colossal importance in American drama. His plays are of the real world, but in a language which seems ripped from the unacknowledged core of that world; his characters do not speak the roundabout speech of polite society, their scenarios do not follow the contours of tranquil naturalism. Rather, they emerge, memorably, as elements of the powerful, pulsing dramatic rhythm that is his trademark.
Yet Mamet has not been known for his portrayals of female characters - in fact, his own sister is on record as suggesting that it was only after his second marriage, in 1991, to the actor Rebecca Pidgeon, that he began to write women with real conviction, even returning to an earlier, autobiographical play, The Cryptogram, to rewrite the role of the mother. Boston Marriage is populated entirely by women - there are men unseen on the fringes, lovers and seducers, but they exist, says Ingram, "only to be deceived". She believes Mamet has captured brilliantly the three female characters of this play, has created a possibility for the type of chemistry between actors - all-female, all-ruthless - that is seldom seen on the stage.
"I've been looking for a play for many years that is a really challenging, rich piece of writing for women," says Ingram. "And this is written for women in a way that a lot of plays exist only for men. And that's what makes the play such a fascinating challenge, really, because Mamet has written it just how Mamet always writes, regardless of whether it's men or women he's writing. The style remains the same - that same attack, same energy and cruelty - they're barbaric to each other, yet they love each other. It's full of passion and power. It's not three women in the hairdresser's, chatting about their children. I think it's so powerful. It's a piece of drama about independent women, historically".
Historically? But what about that feeling you get, as you watch it, that this could be any drawingroom in any city, around 100 years ago; what about the creeping suspicion that these women, with their own dialect, their liberal sexuality, their clashing takes on religion, belong to no country, no history - that they have created a room, as another writer their spirit brings to mind once put it, of their own?
Ingram thinks the absence of specifics is exactly what makes Boston Marriage such a brilliant portrait of an age. "He's writing about a period in history in which women were just beginning to have independence," she argues. "These very well educated society women could exist without men. They didn't have to marry, have children; other ways through were becoming available." It's precisely in taking away the words that might, in another play, be the most openly used - the names, the date, the location - and replacing them with words that would never, in the 1880s, have been spoken aloud in public that Mamet has captured this period; slang is the language of innovation. From it, even the play's name comes - the Boston Marriage, also familiar from Henry James, was a relationship of cohabitation between two women, often a sexual one, but never named as such. "This was a time when legally, it couldn't be defined," says Ingram. "The law courts tried to impose the same ban on lesbian relationships as on male homosexual ones, but they couldn't actually articulate what crime, physically, they could be committing. They couldn't work out how to put it into words, so it slipped through."
Fromthe inability to imagine, to empathise, a hidden world was born; a world in which the ordinary complexity of human relationships was rendered more intense by the secrecy, yet in which the thrill of courting a scandal was tempered by the strain of everyday loving, and needing, and loathing. Into this world, Brennan and Craigie, moving like shadows of each another in the brightness of the rehearsal studio, and with the rich Scottish burr of Donnelly's maid cutting between them, breathe sparkling, subversive life once more.
B*spoke's production of Boston Marriage previews from Tuesday at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, opens on Thursday and runs until September 18th